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MBA class in a post: International Marketing

// January 2nd, 2010 // MBA

In my part time MBA program, I take two classes a semester. The first was Financial Accounting in an International Environment and the second was International Marketing. Here’s what we studied in our International Marketing class.

This class was structured to be entirely group based work. Everything was done in a group, including writing essays. In business, you collaborate on documents all the time, but collaborating on essays was a new challenge I hadn’t done before. I enjoyed this approach as it best represents how the business world works — you almost never work autonomously in business and I appreciated that the assignments were applicable to the world outside of academia in that way. Our group work assignments were usually marketing case studies, with written assignments and in-person presentations with slide (usually Powerpoint) accompaniments.

This class also focused heavily on improving presentation skills with the philosophy that every good manager should be able to present well. For this, we were taught public presentation skills, body language and corporate dress.

Other marketing concepts we studied:

• Marketing mix (4Ps)
• Porter’s 5 Forces
• PEST (marketing is FULL of acronyms)
• Marketplace assessment
• Developing marketing strategies
• Socially responsible marketing
• Analyzing marketing environments
• Marketing research
• Consumer behaviour
• B2B marketing
• Targeting markets (segmentation, targeting and positioning)
• Value creation (including product, branding and packaging decisions)
• Developing new products
• Marketing services vs products
• Establishing value and pricing concepts
• Value delivery (marketing channels and distribution strategies)
• Value communication
• Advertising, sales, promotion
• Global marketing (this part was fascinating)

This class was not only interesting, it added a lot of applicable value to my work right now. I also really enjoyed the challenges of case studies — it was a quick way to learn about industries I knew little about before.

Check out the MBA program in Ryerson if you find this interesting. No — they didn’t tell me to write that.